Mr. Intensity

Anderson Cooper stars as the thinking woman's favorite newsman

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Anderson Cooper is on his way to the airport to fly to South Africa and swim with the great white sharks. This is significant for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that we finally get to interview AC 360 outside his CNN office. Not that talking to Anderson is ever dull, but seeing him in the same (however gleaming) atmosphere of the Time Warner building in New York City was getting a little tired. When you're here to write about a man whose idea of a vacation is covering the Ebola virus, it's kind of nice to go, you know, outside.

But Cooper isn't into the usual contrivances of the magazine profile—there will be no lunch at a trendy restaurant, no "hanging out"—though this has less to do with his view of journalism (you go to the story, the story doesn't come to you, you don't create scenes, and so on) than it does with his discomfort with being the subject instead of the interviewer. It's "weird," he says, this penetrating-question stuff. He doesn't like to think of himself as someone who fascinates beyond his ability to report and deliver news. He insists he is neither interested in nor does he read anything that's written about him, including (perhaps particularly including) the daily panting in the blogosphere, where catty speculation about his personal life has become a genre in and of itself. He considers following his own fame to be a waste of his time. "No offense," he says, "but I won't read this article, either."

And yet he is here. Not just here here, in the back of a black town car with driver. But here—at the top of that rarefied world where a newsman becomes iconic. He is our generation's Edward R. Murrow; that is, if Murrow were this good-looking and had lived in a world with Gawker and TMZ. This is not just because of Cooper's exacting standards of journalism—hard work, legwork, no-divaness. He's a purist, really—like Murrow, his delivery and choice of topics are often fueled by a measured sense of moral outrage. Murrow's anger over Vietnam and Joe McCarthy Red-baiting is Cooper's anger over Katrina and world famine. Cooper never gets hysterical, like some of the other cable stars, but you know when he's pissed. There's a little bit of righteous anger that's damn sexy. He's the Thinking Woman's Newsman.

Somehow he's managed to strike the most delicate balance of being both an old-fashioned reporter at his core and the hippest news guy out there. His ratings, which are the highest they've ever been, are particularly strong in the much-coveted-by-advertisers 18- to 34-year-old demographic, a statistic that has to engender envy among other networks' execs, who are lucky these days to be selling Preparation H and AARP commercials against the nightly news.

For the past two ratings quarters, he's had the No. 1 news show at 10 p.m.—beating Greta Van Susteren's On the Record, which may or may not have had something to do with Greta calling Anderson a "marketing experiment" at CNN and the only journalist who "exploited" Katrina by writing a book. This was almost as classy as when a Fox News flack called him the "Paris Hilton of television news."

"What are you gonna do?" Cooper says. "I mean, the whole point of these things is to provoke somebody to respond, and then you get some sort of silly feud going on and the idea of it, I guess, is that it boosts your ratings and stuff, but it seems like a waste of time to me." He adds: "I honestly wish her nothing but, you know, happiness."

The Greta dustup is a classic example of everything Cooper hates about the business. That and the care and feeding of his celebrity. "He has no idea how starstruck people are by him," says Kelly Ripa, who calls him "the perfect man" and whose show, Live with Regis and Kelly, Cooper cohosts occasionally. "He has no concept of it at all. The notion of it embarrasses him."

So why does he do Regis and Kelly—a show that once featured him grimacing through a "thigh-dancing" segment? "Because it seemed like something completely different and fun. I don't think there's anything wrong with exercising different muscles." He doesn't mean his thigh muscles. For the record, there is one thing he is frequently asked to do that he refuses: play himself in a movie. "It's a blending of reality and fantasy, and that's just not for me."

The fame thing is uneasy for Anderson. His charisma and his success mean that he's been forced to mix that with which he is most comfortable (reporting the news) with that which has been a burden his entire life. It's something you get used to (but never really) being a Vanderbilt's son—make that Gloria Vanderbilt's hot and cerebral Yale-educated son turned CNN (and 60 Minutes) news star. And it's something you get used to (but never really) when the tragedies of your 41-year life—your father's early death, your beloved brother's suicide—have been public fodder, in the way the previous generation knew every sordid detail of your "poor little rich girl" mother's childhood. "The Vanderbilt thing" is a lot less interesting to him than it is to everybody else. "Though I can understand," he says, "why people are interested."

It is always odd when someone who has lived, rather uncomfortably, in the media glare decides to become a member of the media. It's even more unusual when that person is heir to an enormous fortune and private by nature and breeding, but is now on billboards all over Manhattan. So it is understandable, perhaps, that Anderson Cooper, the star of Anderson Cooper 360˚, can sometimes seem more like AC 180. There is a fine line indeed between hating and embracing one's celebrity.

On the way to his town car, Cooper—looking quite adorable today, in jeans, Gore-Tex sneakers, and an ice blue Nike T-shirt that perfectly matches his piercing blue eyes—strolls through the crowded Time Warner building to pick up a book for the plane. New Yorkers are kind to him: They ogle, but they don't pester. (Except for the stalkers—a posse of mostly middle-age women—who wait for him on the curb after the show. "There's a core group of them. A few guys, but mostly...not girls, but women, 50 to 60 years old." He laughs.) He has just come from having lunch with his mother. He had to break it to her that he was going to swim with sharks.

Cooper is traveling by himself today—an 18-hour journey to South Africa—which is typical. He doesn't do entourages, and in fact, unlike the majority of his colleagues, he doesn't even take an assistant when he ventures to far-flung places. It makes him uncomfortable. Plus, he thinks he gets better stories when it's just him and a cameraman or two. His modus operandi is to "basically turn the camera on and get out of the way." Let the people tell their stories. Don't worry about the lighting. He thinks viewers would rather it be real. Jeff Fager, the producer of 60 Minutes, where Anderson moonlights (it's how he takes his vacation time from CNN), remembers how the first producer he sent him out with came back to report: "Anderson isn't low maintenance. He's no maintenance."

Charlie Moore, his longtime producer at CNN, says, "I think everybody has a preconceived notion of where he came from, so...he made a decision to crack through that idea that things are gonna be handed to him." Instead, he took the "Okay, I'm just gonna work harder than everybody else" approach.

"He doesn't have a big fancy dressing room, he doesn't even have his own dedicated assistant," says his boss, Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN. "And he doesn't even want those trappings. He's suspicious of them, feels they are not necessary and in fact harmful to the mission."

Today's mission to South Africa is part of his new Planet in Peril series for CNN, airing in December—which in itself is So Anderson. "We had talked about what we were going to do on the environment, and a lot of it just seemed kind of theoretical: guys debating. So we thought, Why not approach it like any other news story?" Anderson says. "Rather than having some debate over future modeling of climate, let's go to Greenland and let's see how bad it really is. Let's go to the forests in Central Africa and see about the habitat loss and species loss. So that's why we were just in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon and Rwanda," last July, hunting the genesis of the monkeypox virus and the origin of HIV.

"We were following around this epidemiologist as he basically tracks hunters through the jungle, 'cause they're the first ones who have interaction with animals. And when viruses pass, they often pass either to the hunter or to the person butchering the animal for meat." When Cooper talks about this, he is almost loose—far more fluid than when talking about himself. "There was a lot of stuff I didn't know," he continues. "I mean, I had no idea that they now know all this stuff about HIV. For instance, they believe they've isolated the region in Cameroon where HIV first crossed over into humans. And they now think it happened as far back as 1908, which I think is fascinating."

So it's not for kicks that he has taken time off from his (excellent) presidential campaign coverage or his other adventures and spent his "free time" these past weeks getting certified as a scuba diver. The South Africa caper will entail diving with "this guy who believes sharks are misunderstood, and so he dives with great whites. He doesn't use a cage. He actually swims with them." He smiles. "I've opted to use a cage." Good, use the cage! "We have a special mask that allows you to talk underwater, so I'll have a microphone in the mask. And we'll have a biologist with me in the cage, whom I'll be interviewing while underwater with the sharks."

He admits in the car, however, "I don't like diving and I don't like sharks. I don't like fish darting out. I don't like things that move in ways I can't predict." Pause. "So why am I diving with great white sharks?" He laughs. "I can't really tell you why I agreed to do this."

Sure he can. It's So Anderson to go do something crazy that, say, Brian Williams might not. "I don't like there being anything that I'm intimidated to do. I feel you should just jump headfirst into things."

Clearly.

"Hey," he says to the driver. "Do you know where we're going? JFK?" Cooper travels so much, it's hard to keep track.

Between us on the backseat is his beat-up, brown backpack. But this is nothing compared to his suitcase—a hideous, ripped, frayed black thing on rollers that looks like it came from Overstock.com. "I think I got it 10 years ago at one of those charity silent auctions." It's a piece of crap.

"I know. My cameramen were making fun of it the other day too. But it's been around the world and it's still going."

Inside the crappy suitcase, he's packed two pairs of jeans, six T-shirts, a wet suit, and fins.

You have fins in your suitcase?

"I do, actually."

The only sign of decadence I can discern is the Rolex on his wrist. "That's, I guess, the fanciest thing I have."

It's good you have something nice.

"Yeah, that was my big—the biggest item I ever purchased, actually. Well, other than my apartment."

Of course he isn't living in that apartment; he's been living in a "small one bedroom apartment for two years that has virtually nothing in it," while his nice, expensive apartment is being renovated.

"But it's got a bed and it's got a television and it's got a sofa, and it's got some books that I collected over the years.... So yeah, I've just been camping out. Which is fine. I've done that a lot. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I lived for a year in a place with nothing but a mattress and a bowl and a spoon, so I could eat cereal in the morning. That was a little bleak."

And wasn't there some weird diet you did for a while?

"Well, yeah, food is just not that important to me. I tend to eat the same thing over and over again." Like? "Sushi's my latest thing. This'll run its course after a couple weeks, and then I'll switch to something else." For a while, he says, "I rediscovered scrambled egg whites. So I was eating a lot of scrambled egg whites."

"Um, yeah, I'm sure I do. But none I would want to talk to you about." He laughs.

He can't remember the last time he took a real vacation. There was that trip to

Colombia that was supposed to be a vacation, but all he could think of when he got there was doing stories on drug trafficking. When 60 Minutes came calling—"a dream come true," he says, though adds he had no desire to leave CNN (it's the news operation most likely to indulge his passions)—he decided to do both. That means his vacations and weekends are spent reporting 60 Minutes segments, none of which is a cakewalk. (He started with a piece on the systematic rape of women and girls in the Congo, called "The War Against Women.")

One night a few weeks before he headed off to swim with the sharks, I sat backstage as he did his show. Afterward, he was most concerned with getting home to read up for his trip to Cameroon, Rwanda, and the Congo. As he stood in a room at CNN removing his makeup, I asked him if he was ever scared, going to these places. "Yeah, a lot of times." A pause. "But people are going through this stuff, so I don't think it's too much to ask that I or other reporters do so as well. Their stories need to be told." Then comes a realization: "He says, as he takes off his makeup."

The irony of being Anderson Cooper is never lost on Anderson Cooper.

As he left the building that night, he told me what he really wanted to do more than anything was "go do an Ebola outbreak." But they're usually in very isolated areas, by the time you get there the outbreak is over, etc. "And every company I've ever worked for has been loath to send me."

Back in the car, he tells me, "I've learned a trick, which is, if I suggest going to a place and they say no, then I just take vacation days and plan a trip there myself. That usually forces their hand to say, `Well, okay, we'll send a camera crew with you.'"

Was there ever a time they still said no? "There was this Marburg virus outbreak in Angola? About three years ago?" Didn't hear about that one—and that's the point. "It wasn't a major headline story and was logistically a very difficult story and expensive and would have taken a lot of time. They asked me not to do it. So I filed for vacation to go by myself." He smiles a wicked little smile. "Um, they got wind of it and canceled my vacation, actually." He laughs. "Basically, wiser heads prevailed."

Is there anything he's afraid of? The only thing that really freaked him out, at first, wasn't the war zones or funky jungles or shark-infested waters, but...public speaking. "But I forced myself to do it and now I'm fine with it."

To understand Cooper—why he pushes himself, why he tempts fate as a sport, why he always seems to have to prove himself—it helps to know why he got into this. The first catharsis happened when he was 10 and his father, Wyatt Cooper, a bon vivant author and character, suddenly died (a heart attack, at age 50). It devastated Anderson; it's been over 30 years now, and he still thinks of Wyatt "every day, without a doubt." At the time, it made him determined to go find work—as a 10-year-old and a Vanderbilt. "I wanted to be financially independent and I wanted to earn my own money," he says one day in his office at CNN. "Because I felt like...my world had been turned upside down and I wanted to tell myself that I could survive on my own. I think when you lose a parent at a young age, you realize the world is a much different place than you thought it was. And, um, I wanted to be able to know that I could function in this new world."

So you became a model?

"It seemed like a pretty easy, good way to make $75 dollars an hour," he says. He'd read an article about child models and decided to send some pictures to the Ford Modeling Agency, and "then I used to call there every day after school." He eventually got a call back and started going on auditions. "I was the only kid who went to these things by themselves. Like, everyone else had their mother accompanying them. It was very strange." Gloria just wasn't into that sort of thing. "You know, she had bigger things going on.... But I think it's much better if you're able to achieve things on your own. A lot of kids I grew up with and went to school with have continued on in their parents' business and I find that very strange. It's just completely alien to me."

So Anderson became a Ford Model. At age 10.

"It's not like I was working in a coal mine."

The problem was, he sort of wanted to work in a coal mine. In his best-selling memoir, Dispatches from the Edge, he describes a wanderlust, and also a longing to do something more important than be on the crew team at Yale. His father was a brilliant storyteller, and Anderson inherited that gene but wasn't quite sure what to do with it. Then, at 22, it crystallized for him—through a tragedy that seems more than a person should have to bear.

The gruesome details of his brother's suicide—his only sibling, Carter, the elder son of Gloria Vanderbilt—were front page news for weeks in the summer of 1988. In Anderson's book, he doesn't hold back in describing what happened—and how it continues to haunt him. He was on a subway in Washington, DC, when Carter plunged 14 stories from the balcony of Anderson's bedroom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan while his mother pleaded with him to come in from the ledge. He writes about the clues he should have seen—his brother's recent depression over a breakup; his looking disheveled and pained when Anderson had last seen him at a Yale crew race—and the torture of wondering, "What if?" As he writes in his book: "I try not to imagine my brother hanging from the ledge. Try not to picture him pressed against the balcony, his legs dangling stories above the concrete sidewalk. Did a couple out for a summer stroll catch a glimpse of him before he let go? Did a family gathered around the dinner table see him plunge past their window? What was he thinking right before he hit the ground? That's the thing about suicide. No matter how much you try to remember how that person lived his life, you can't forget how he ended it."

It's been 20 years since his brother's suicide, yet Anderson's reasons for getting into this business still are never far from the surface. "I wanted to go places," he says, "where people understood loss and people knew more about it than I did. And where things seemed very real."

A few weeks before the shark trip, Cooper is in his CNN office overlooking Central Park. The staff of AC 360º shares a sprawling floor with Campbell Brown's staff, but Cooper's own private office, off to the side, is his little sanctuary. Except for the hidden closet behind his desk—in which there are rows and rows of neatly organized suits and crisply pressed shirts—and the tower of flat screen TVs, the office is both personal and touching. There's the framed photo of the ramshackle house in Quitman, Mississippi, where his father was born; photos of colleagues who died in war zones; his Emmys (one of which is wearing his gas mask); the helmet that he takes with him to places like Mogadishu and Iraq; a dozen little toy soldiers ("I collected toy soldiers. I have thousands of them, in storage somewhere"); a burned license plate from Sarajevo ("it's from a car that got blown up and destroyed on a street where I was"); a box with Saddam Hussein's picture on it that "I bought in the Palestine Hotel, before it got blown up"; a couple Sesame Street puppets (he's volunteered his time on the show); a photo of him and his kindergarten teacher. But the most arresting image is the one tacked up by his computer screen: the sweetest snapshot of a baby, naked and innocent, smiling on an expensive checkered couch. His brother, Carter.

After Carter's death, Anderson felt a great need to do something profound—partly to wrestle with his own demons. So he went to the worst places on earth, even though in the beginning he'd have an anxiety attack every time he got on a plane. At first, he couldn't even get a job as an assistant in TV news, despite his looks, his family, and his Yale degree. (He never told anyone who he was.) So he bought a handheld camera and got a friend to gin up a fake press pass on his Mac, and he went by himself to Kenya, Thailand, and Somalia, sending dispatches back to a station in New York, until finally someone gave him a job.

A few years later, he was a correspondent at ABC news, then hosted the competitive reality show The Mole, then CNN scooped him up and teamed him with Aaron Brown. The contrast of the hipster Anderson and his on-air laptop with the increasingly tedious Brown led to Aaron's firing and Anderson's knighting in 2005.

Someone knocks on his door and hands him his lunch. Sushi and a Diet Coke. (It's still sushi month.) He actually apologizes for having an assistant bring him this.

He talks about how he always felt more like a Cooper than a Vanderbilt. "My dad had come from a very strong family—there were a lot more cousins and aunts and uncles on the Cooper side, and I saw them and I visited them in Mississippi, and that felt very much more real to me.... I went to one of the Vanderbilt houses in Newport one time, with my mom and dad and brother, and, like, took the tour."

What was that like? "You know, it's a nice house. They seemed to have spent an awful lot of money on it." He laughs. "But it was like visiting someone else's life."

That said, he's very close to his mother, who's now 84. "I have lunch with her pretty regularly, and I hang out with her occasionally on weekends. And she's a really cool lady. She's never been sort of a traditional mom." He laughs. "But I'm certainly at a point now in my life where I love the perspective she has on things. She's lived multiple lives and comes from a time that doesn't exist anymore. And yet is incredibly modern." She always told him to "follow his bliss." Even if his bliss was Mogadishu.

"I left high school early and drove across southern Africa in a truck. When I was 17. She was pretty nice to let me do that."

It was brave of her to let you do that, after—

"Yeah, to see your other son go into combat zones." A pause. "She's pretty remarkable."

He says it surprises him that people think he gets emotional—he was called "Emo-man" after his legendary breakdown while covering Katrina, even though what he expressed was precisely what most viewers were feeling. "I'm a WASP, so I'm pretty shut down. I'm not the most emotive person," he says. "On a lot of shows, there are people screaming and yelling, and angry, and, um, I'm pretty even-keeled." This is true. "But there was that one instance, or maybe two, during Katrina, the wake of Katrina, where I got emotional. But those were things I didn't plan on and wish, you know, I hadn't done."

It was while he was in New Orleans for Katrina that he began writing Dispatches from the Edge, in which, in a very un-WASPy manner, he more or less opened a vein, writing about his mother, his father's death, his brother's suicide, juxtaposed with haunting stories from his reporting. He says that covering Katrina caused him to suddenly see connections that had eluded him before. "The stories seemed very tied together. With, you know, the work I was doing overseas and the things all of us saw and witnessed in Katrina, and things in my own life. I didn't view it as, I'm writing a memoir in which it's All About Me. To me, it was really a book about loss. And survival. And about death."

In the book, he wrote of how he wanted to find the answer, after his brother killed himself, to "why some people thrive in situations that others can't tolerate." Did he find the answer?

"I'm not sure I did. I mean, I find it endlessly fascinating that some people have an inner core or an inner drive or something that allows them to move forward despite all this stuff. And, it's really something my mom has."

You have it, don't you think?

"Um, I don't know. I'm not sure." He stares at his sushi. "But certainly a lot of the people I do stories on have that. And I think it's something just—either early-on experiences that have caused them to want to move forward, and want to continue. But I also think that it is a very thin line between success and failure."

When did you ever feel close to failure?

"Close to failure?" He laughs an uncomfortable laugh. "I feel close to failure every day. Don't you?"

He takes a break to do a voice-over for the night's show. Next he pops a couple vitamins and pills for his cholesterol (he is vigilant, given his father's health history). Then, as he finishes his sushi, I bring up a topic "that everyone wants to know about." He nods, he knows what's coming. "Your personal life."

"Mmm-hmm," he says.

You have said you made a decision long ago to keep it private.

"Mmm-hmmm."

But really, I wonder, since it's speculated about constantly anyway, might it be better to just address it and move on?

A pause. "I don't pay attention to what people say. Or, um...I think everyone has a right to a certain amount of privacy. And, um, you know, I like to maintain, attempt to maintain, a certain amount of privacy."

But does he ever think that by talking about it maybe he could move beyond it?

"People are always gonna talk about something. So, nothing stops anything. It just moves it to another subject and then there's nothing ever, um..."

Private?

"Private."

Cooper's driver pulls up to the curb at JFK airport. "No, that's okay," says the anchor, preferring to haul his own suitcase from the trunk.

We begin an awkward goodbye.

Well, it's been fun.

"Yeah, well, I hope so."

Don't get eaten by sharks.

"Well, if I do, you got the last interview, so there you go."

Yeah, really, let's look on the bright side.

"`The emotional last interview.' You can talk about how you saw him off at the airport and he seemed so optimistic and happy." Deep anchor voice now: "`He died doing what he loved.'"

He invites me to accompany him as he checks in for his flight and proceeds to the business-class lounge. But we never get that far.

Once inside the airport, an executive from South African Air, who has been waiting for Cooper (the guy checks the manifest every morning to see if Anyone Important is onboard), greets him effusively and escorts him to the VIP lounge. But on the way, a crowd has gathered, peering over a two-story ledge above the food court. There are gasps. And shouts. Cooper looks and then instantly, instinctively, gently pushes me back. "Don't look. Don't look." A man has jumped—or has fallen; it is hard to tell at this point—to his death onto the food court at JFK, and his head is split open on the floor, and it's a terrible scene, and the nice man from South African Air is reporting that it appears that the man is dead. "He's done."

Cooper is concerned with making sure that I don't have to see it. "Please don't look," he repeats, and I listen to him. The South African Air guy says goodbye ("You do great work") and points him away from the carnage to the VIP lounge. Of course Cooper doesn't go to the VIP lounge. He looks to see if I have left, then takes the stairs down to the scene of the tragedy.